


Without any maybes but musts

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Bittersweet, Character Study, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1525133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the middle of the night, River found a message in her kitchen; the Doctor's clumsy way of asking her on a special date. The words withheld on the paper were telling of a different story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without any maybes but musts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for River and Eleven's anniversary.
> 
> Title from _End come too soon_ by Wild Beasts

“To R. The Doctor."

The yellow sticky note was adorning the single windowpane above the kitchen sink, where he would usually cut himself because he could not admire the view on the valley below while drying the cutlery. She delicately plucked the menial square of paper, dirtied at the corner as if someone’s finger had repeatedly come in contact with the sticky part. Fingers grazing the absurd sticks and smile tickling the corner of her mouth, she noticed with amusement it looked uncannily like a reversed picture of the sky displayed through the window.

The idiot was nursing his clumsiness with pseudo-astronomy.

She chuckled and the sound, echoed by a bird call, startled her.

He had left the door to her garden wide open, no present but the deep night hung at her handle. One step and she would be sinking in earth and dew; the alleyway was not equipped with lights or even a proper alley. She had kept the ground bare, battered, gravel or pavement poor adversary to his eternal absent-minded-ness. He once had landed a Sontaran drone on her doorstep.

Silence was completely dark and hers. Like a cover, under which he would soon slip and hold her tight. He knew of the exact spot he had to caress on the crest of her shoulders, to set her in a mood of contemplation and serenity. He knew of the exact moment he had to step in to be ridiculous and mad and charming. But without uttering a word.

In words, he could give her nothing –lies were perfunctory, spoilers physical laws, confessions... She shook her head. He kept giving her universal skies that had been discussed and sung throughout the course of History. He had nothing to add. She shivered, securing around her the ample robe she had picked at random in the living room –pretty colours, but drafty.

Confessions, of love, of trust, of boredom even, were fussy, incomprehensible fire-balls she always had a feeling she had to give birth to, and feed, and clean, and raise, and drag to school, and _bear_ again to maturity, and eventually send out to the world, before they could come back with words heartfelt –and seem not futile expression of intimacy. Except maybe, not words.

It had never been words.

A toad began calling at the back of her garden and she took note of the necessity to clean the pond after the last storm. The grass was tickling her ankles. The sky was clear of TARDIS or any other display of stupidity and bravura he could try to land on her lawn.

Confessions did not come easy to either of them. With age, they seemed to grow feints out of habits, to say without saying. But for their hundredth anniversary, he had _accepted_ to be buried with her.

They had spent a romantic afternoon in one of the seven sacred cities of Ottokhar. Sun, fever of roaming through streets napping, greasy shoes bought on the market. Accent so thick and ancient, fossils of syllables and syntaxes practically, she could hear the dust inhabiting the consonants. Sweets shared with scoundrels on the roof of a bathhouse in the maze of the old town had concluded a day of teasing the police and running after a donkey the Doctor had taken a liking to. From above the sea of roofs, purple, a dark smoke had frayed: the second part of an old married couple had been burnt. His ashes would be joining his wife’s on the bark of the tree they had chosen together deep in the forest.

The night come, she had taken as an excruciating shock the realization she would be alone in her grave –unless he braves his guilt and bury her with her parents. She could not contemplate this with sadness. Only shock –that the thought had not come to her before, that it had been so sharp a pain, rather than the bittersweet, life-celebrating ache that was proof of how she kept overcoming fate, choices and lives made for her.

They would not have the selfish privilege of dying together or put in the same grave, side by side. Lovers do that, or have a puny, vain way of marking the universe with their names entangled –on trees, of all places, on monuments and necklaces. They were careful enough to leave theirs separate, -as their lives-, all over the world. Always calling from one end of time to the other rather than making a statement. Their names could never be found together; historians would look after painting them multiple and united; a wild and dancing combination of designations that could have been theirs.

They never themselves dared to entwine their name, afraid of committing to the world memory a spelling that would rub off their name, stretch it out of recognizable proportions.

On the pier looking down on the desert around the sixth sacred city of Ottakhar, a temporary temple had been erected to be burnt at dawn, carrying, written on its walls of paper, the population’s messages to their dead. It had been a sacred day in the sacred city. Maybe the solemnity of its dusty windows, opened on believers already gazing beyond, held afloat by prayers, made him more attentive.

He could read death on her face. And for once, there was no irony in her brow. He felt she was alone and fearing an eternity in this consensus.

That’s the night he had accepted to be buried with her. Only not. Time travel is complicated, but has the advantage of allowing to report to now what could only be done tomorrow.

Funerals.

At night, they had tiptoed in the darkness and written each other’s name on the temple’s wall.

The stars were blinking through a veil of clouds.

They had moved, all hands and nerves, to a bare spot in a corner. She could feel him tense in her palm, and she could not guarantee that, had she made a gesture to his face and attempted to caress his anxiety away, he would not have leapt and rolled away like an animal. He fished for the marker they had chosen, bickering –he wanted red, she wanted green- and began tracing the letters on the uneven surface. Her hand fell on his, stopping. She caressed the back of his hand before reaching for the felt.

She wrote their names in Gallifreyan.

The first rays of the dawn were not painting the lace doors, that their confession was committed to ashes. Said and burnt.

Writing their name together would mean confirming an alteration of being that would never suit their independence. Her name as depicted when besides his, even undecipherable, would gain a meaning she found dangerous to leave out there, something to be taken from her at any moment, eventually used against them.

He felt the same.

As a consequence, neither of them would sign the messages or when they would, no terms of endearment holding identification would appear. Addressed seemingly to everyone and no one, their love notes would contribute to the game they intend to turn the world into. Mystery and smokes and generations of historians tearing their hair over what was an inside joke.

She could write Sweetie in Cairo and Baby face in Aldebran, because she knew his name. He could call her River or Melody, knowing perfectly they had become a transliteration of what she chose to be rather than a name. A plethora of names grow on the turf that has been turned to bury the body; each, they had an infinity of names out of carelessness – they had both outlived, crimes after crimes, events that had killed their identities, all of them.

He could write her name in an alphabet completely new and she would still understand it –because he had a silly handwriting, obviously, whatever the language. She understands; _that_ name does not matter. Primarily because she poured so little of her in the making of herself that every name she or he could choose would work as a gnosis of her being. And every name he was given by her, by others, or tempted to respond to had become a tally at the end of the game. Reduced to periphrases and vague appellations that would never satisfy a taxonomist.

Except when their name were written together.

River had the unpleasant impression that in writing their name alongside, they were revealing a translation that, although wildly apart from whom they were, could unthread them at the core. He would keep her name to herself for as long as she would his.

And if they never said each other “I love you”, it was because “I” and “you” would have encompassed as exactly who they were as “River” and “the Doctor”, it was because the silence even occupying every glance and smile and touch and frown was a call to the other.

He had called her lover and traitor, with equal love and admiration. She had called him liar and dear and aloof and Doctor. It had never mattered.

A pair of hands brushed the small of her back before circling her waist, gingerly, hoisting her out from her reverie, back in her garden before the sky. His fingers had not yet bopped the swell of her hips, when a stifled groan buzzed next to her ear and within a second all the Doctor hands were busy trying to extract his right hand from the tangle of fabric that was her robe. Before she could turn or muster a zinger, he had yelped, lost balance and ended up in the nearest bush. He was wearing a tux, the blessed dear.

“What is this thing? It threw me!”

She extended a hand to help him to his feet, taking in with an appreciative hum the effort he had put in the new haircut and suit and… general face. She could eat him when he looked this scrumptious. And a bit pale, but the night was blue on the entire garden.

“You gave it to me.” Her hands caressed the fabric of his vest, absently, and he latched on her wrist, a tad intense. She looked up to his face, which he stretched promptly in a ridiculous smile. He cleared his throat, taking a step back, without letting go of her, something clicking behind his brows.

“Well, that explains nothing,” he chided.

“It’s a ‘Ctopi dress.”

He raised an eyebrow at a tree, took a spin and dove forward to investigate her nightdress, its tentacles catching the dim light.

“Does it have to have so many points of access?”

“You must have found the left south primary back-pocket.”

The fabric fell back in place with a soft ruffle, and he offered an arm to her, attentive to the ground.

“I won’t ask.”

“Where are we going?” She was curious –and not exactly in the mood for crashing a party in her pajamas.

“Nowhere.” He stopped in the middle of the garden, shaking a spot of dirt from his shoe and she pouted. She was definitely noticing the distractions he seemed to be giving himself. “Don’t worry, I have quite a game for you tonight.”

“A game? Are you serious? You are keeping me awake for a game? I have to meet Pr. Bear tomorrow for the-”

“Hush… Shut up. Do you know tonight is the night you can see as much stars as ever from here?” He did a little jump on the spot and she shivered, out of exasperation. “It’s a brilliant planet you chose to live on, Doctor Song, one of the prettiest skies in the Universe.”

“Yeah, I know. I had to pay for this cottage. What are you-“

“Tonight is the night the sky is opening its magnificent infinity to your doorstep. I came to play connecting the dots with you.”

She chortled, not hiding her annoyance.

“Because you came back from a date with me, where you must have drunk, although I really don’t know why I would have let that happen—“

He tugged at her elbow with one hand and with the other waved to the sky.

“A date with you, then, and another one now. Because when the sky is filled with so many stars, you can read absolutely everything if you connect the dots. So tonight, we’re going to read the stars.” He looked at her, finally, and her hearts stammered when she realized his eyelashes were oddly stuck together, as if he had childishly wiped away tears.

A date with her- _spoilers._

She had to stop the wheels and cogs behing her brows.

“I am going to read you a string of fantastic names and messages in there. And you are going to listen to all of them.” He eyed her with emotion and silliness. “River Song. Even those that don’t exist but probably do in another language or alphabet or Universe. I may invent a patois, spoken only in your garden, except not a patois because they are technically-”

 

He knew she was not really listening to his words and neither was he, that night. They fell asleep in the veranda, wrapped in each other, warm with laughter and kisses; having exchanged everything that was to exchange.

Save for one night in her future.


End file.
